Magenta

A color crayoning dynasty.

Although hard to say out loud, no other words came to mind when I found out recently that my son had followed in his older sister’s footsteps by winning his division of the Effingham Fire Department’s annual coloring contest.

“Dad, guess what?” he asked me a few weeks ago after school.

“He won the coloring contest!” his sister interrupted.

“No he didn’t.”

“Yes, he did.

“Yes I did!”

“You did?”
            “He won the contest!”

“That’s unbelievable!”

Now, as a seasoned father, I should have known better than to say such a veiled insult out loud. Besides that, it’s really not unbelievable that he won. Most grade schoolers color like children, and because he has inherited his mother’s inspiring attention to detail, coloring inside the lines is kind of his thing.

It was surprising to me, however, that he won exactly twelve months after his sister, who is also a good color crayoner, but who is also his sibling. (I just assumed there was a familial term limit kind of policy.) However, art is art, and so, here we are, trudging through an actual column about a grade school coloring contest.

Granted, one might point out that there are too many real things happening in the world—the mid-term elections, political discord, vaping—to discuss simple color crayoning.  Others will smirk, perhaps even scoff. “Yeah, right. Who’s coloring what? One family wins two years in a row? Put down the magenta, dad, and go mow the lawn.”

Nonsense. I do not color. In fact, I’m so busy I don’t even have time to write a column about the mid-term elections.

More importantly, however, color crayoning in our home has never been just about coloring. Crayoning is life, and if you want your grade school kid to have a chance at this kind of glory, then consider a few of these uncertified life-coaching tips.

First off, children need to live in a color-crayon rich environment. In other words, your house must be full of colors. This means you should own multiple boxes of crayons and even more Ziploc bags full of crayons. You should also have at least three or four unopened boxes of crayons for no real good reason.

 If you’re serious about this, and you should be, I would also recommend having crayons in your couch cushions and beneath your couch. You should have crayons on the floor and in the car, buried in the car seat and melted into the door. If you want to win a coloring contest, at no point in your child’s day should they be more than three feet from color crayons.

Secondly, everything your child creates with those crayons is art, from the moment they dawdle up the table to well into adolescence. Save it all. Put their papers into folders and put those folders into boxes. Date them. Hang them on the refrigerator. Hang them on the freezer. Hang them from the washing machine. Anything that is remotely magnetic should have a picture on it, drawn by your children, dated and digitally archived.

Finally, and I cannot emphasize this enough, fill your house with huge amounts of random objects, like seven dozen plastic Easter eggs. It’s important that young artists have numerous tactile objects for them to draw and for parents to trip over, and then for them to draw a picture of their parents tripping over.  Unless your house looks like Santa Claus crashed into it and no one called the cops, your kid is not winning this contest.

 In closing, although this year’s winners have already been selected, as they say in Chicago and, as of late, St. Louis, “there’s always next year.” Until 2021, that is, when their kid sister struts into South Side with a backpack full of wax.

Sweeping

After grading essays for two hours straight, it has occurred to me that the strength of a student's writing often hinges on what they omit as opposed to what they produce. Contractions, personal pronouns, weak words, unclear pronouns...none of them are that big of a deal here and there, but the cumulative effect is that they muddy the water. The writing is less clear, less concise, less inviting. Sweep away that which is unneeded, in writing and in life, and allow the vivid to remain.

We Cool

The Labor Day parade was probably just as hot as normal, but it felt warmer this year because of the sun. In the past we had watched beneath mature trees that shaded us throughout the parade. This year we started out in the shade, but beneath younger leaves. As the sun crept higher, our group, perhaps a dozen of us, began to splinter. A portion huddled beneath one short tree while part of us sought relief a few feet east. We moved further apart as the parade inched along. By the time we left, nearly a yard full of noon-day sun separated what had once been a single group of parade watchers.

We moved away from each other because of the heat, not out of any desire to part ways, but I couldn’t help but consider the irony of our behavior in light of the numerous office seekers campaigning down the road. Republicans following Democrats, Democrats behind Republicans, often seeking the same office, often not. Talking with each other, amongst themselves, smiling, sweating, walking along the route, shaking hands with folks along the road.

It seems we moved away from each other quickly. I moved my own chair three or so times in ten minutes. I sought shade. It was more comfortable. I wasn’t going to risk a sunburn. In the end, it was easier than sweating.

Speaking of politics and separation, the death of Senator McCain last month seemed testimony to just how far our nation as a whole has splintered. Granted, we have been talking about a cultural and ideological rift for quite some time, but it all seemed more concrete, more vivid, in light of our nation’s schizophrenic and sometimes vitriolic reaction to his passing.

Can we not even get death right anymore?

Shouldn’t this one have been easy? Regardless of your political persuasion, regardless of what you thought of his voting record, a man is dead. He died after a painful struggle with a terrible disease.

A man is dead, and he left behind a family and friends who suffered themselves, through the ordeal of watching his decay and who continue to suffer in his loss. He was a soldier and a senator and he died, so if nothing kind can be said about him, we should just put down our smart phones and go do the dishes or something.

Take a cue from our kindergarten teachers and not say anything at all.

This one should have been easy, but nothing seems easy anymore because of the heat. Nothing seems easy anymore because of the splintering that has been exacerbated in recent years by the endless barking on both sides of the fence, because of our constant social media feeds full of “news” and “un-news” and anger and hate.

Nothing seems easy anymore because of gerrymandered congressional districts that are so far left or so far right that the opposing party doesn’t bother putting candidates on the ballot, where appeasing the base is the only thing that makes any political sense.

Nothing seems easy, but the reality is, it has never been easy. Political heat has been around a long while. Hamilton and Jefferson played nice for a short while, mostly out of regard for their boss, but that lasted a mere season. Soon they also splintered, and we have had at least two political parties slugging it out ever since.

It has never been easy; it certainly wasn’t easy, or comfortable, in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, when delegates hammered out the details to the Constitution.

It has always been hot. The difference between now and then seems to be one of priorities. The priority then seemed to be creating a sustainable nation, of designing something that would work in the long term for the entire country. Something to make all the blood shed during the Revolution somehow worth it.

The priority now seems to be getting elected and staying that way, regardless of what that actually looks like on television or the internet, and in spite of those who truly sacrificed everything for this country. Long term growth and sustainability has been sacrificed for a short term bump in popularity during our never-ending political season.

Speaking of which, towards the end of the parade, I spotted a candidate I actually knew: Dave Seiler. He and I have known each other for years; two of his kids competed on my scholastic bowl team and his youngest son now sits in my sophomore English class. He noticed me and we shook hands; the parade had come to a lull, so we visited a bit before he walked on down the road.

Dave will make a good legislator, but not because he’s a Democrat. Dave will make a good legislator because he’s smart and he’s honest and he’s willing to work hard. He’s also running for the right reasons, not because he is interested in a career in politics or because he has some ideological axe to grind.

Those are the kind of attributes needed right now, and it seems those are the kind of traits that helped form the nation in the first place.

The reality is, democracy is not cool, and living in a republic is not comfortable. This is because in order for it to function as designed it require effort, not just from those walking in the parade, but also from those on the sidewalks watching. It requires voting, at the minimum; it requires engagement and the hammering out of details.

From our leaders, governing a republic requires sitting together in the sun, despite the heat, and ignoring the urge to slink back into shadows cast by baser instincts.

"A Bad Feeling..."

In a world filled with such warnings, earlier this summer we witnessed yet another sign of the end of all things: a Star Wars movie that won’t make bank.

 Released on Memorial Day weekend, Solo, a film that answers all questions—asked and otherwise—about a millennial-aged Han Solo, actually did do well at the box office for its first week. However, sales quickly dropped afterwards and experts predict that the pricey film will become the first Star Wars movie in history to actually lose money.

What?

How?  

Aren’t Star Wars movies supposed to be the Homewood Grill of the movie business? So delicious, so highly anticipated that we jot down their opening date on our calendars, scheduling other life events, like weddings and funerals, around their release?

What happened?

Now, before discussing a topic—film marketing—of which I have no real understanding, I will begin by saying that Solo is a fine movie. If you’re still waiting to see it, there is plenty in the film to like and nothing, really, to get you too upset. (Far removed from any Skywalker family drama and the cult-like whininess that goes along with it, Solo really is a stand-alone movie; a “popcorn” heist that just happens to take place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, somewhere in between episodes three and four.)

 The acting is fine, the script is fine, the dialogue is OK; it’s a Star Wars movie. There is running and jumping and things blow up. Unfortunately, the producers made the very same set of mistakes that so many of us in our modern culture have a tendency to make: a disastrous combination of over-sharing coupled with bad timing.

Now, as it pertains to “oversharing,” keep in mind that Solo was released a mere five months after the incredibly successful but also deliriously hyped Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. To put into context, the original Star Wars movie, A New Hope, was released in 1977. That film was a legitimate “blockbuster,” which justified a second movie, The Empire Strikes Back. Episode V, however, was not released until 1980, and the climax of the original trilogy, Return of the Jedi, was released a full three years after that.

Although I would never have admitted it at the time, waiting for the next film was always part of the original magic. There was no lack of anticipation for the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999, and then the other two films in 2002 and 2005 respectively. Granted, these movies were not as good as the first trio, but they certainly didn’t lose money.

And, again, nearly a decade stood between the release of Episode III and Episode VII, which went on to earn around two billions dollars worldwide at the box office.

Star Wars has become so popular, however, so ridiculously shoved into every nook and cranny of our mass culture –toys, cartoons, t-shirts, one, ahem, click-bait article after another— that the magic of anticipation is totally gone, sacrificed into the Rancor pit of market saturation.

The handlers of Star Wars, thus, have become our bored Aunt Betty on Facebook, inundating our newsfeeds with eight political commentaries, four recipes, a set of obscure motivational quotes that she doesn’t even realize contradict each other, and a picture of her pet cat wearing a new scarf.

Every. Day.

And I love Star Wars, but as I was discussing with a fellow fan a few months ago, I was not really “looking forward,” to watching Solo in the first place, at least not in the same way I anticipated the new Avengers film, which actually brings us to our second idea – bad timing.

Solo had no business being released in May, not with Thanos was still scouring the galaxy for his lost jewels and Deadpool’s Cable also doing something fierce. (I haven’t seen Deadpool but the lame joke here is that both characters are played by Josh Brolin.)

      Regardless, countless life lessons have been gleaned from this franchise over the years, and now, thankfully, we can add a few others.

For starters, greed, like fear, can lead to the dark side. When Disney purchased Lucasfilm a few years ago, fans, including me, greeted the news with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Yes, this meant new Star Wars movies to look forward to, but at what cost? Well, now we know. Instead of nurturing their golden goose and allowing those eggs to incubate, Disney is trying to make as many omelets as they can. Bad idea. Eggs are delicious but too many will kill you.

Secondly, we should not be like Aunt Betty. A little mystery is kind of cool. For example, where did Han Solo get his blaster? Who cares? We need to keep some things to ourselves. Silence; a relaxed lull in the conversation; a day or two, or eight, of not reading something inflammatory on Twitter; all of these fond absences give more meaning and value to what we do decide to share.

Finally, do not release your movie when Avengers Part Three is still in theatres.

Iron Man, Captain America, Thor? Spider Man, Black Panther, Hulk? Every single Guardian of the Galaxy? I’m sorry, but they were all in that movie, plus a dozen other superheroes ready to run and jump and blow things up. Are you going to buy tickets to a barbecue with a sloppy Joe sandwich in your back pack? Think about it. Be aware of your surroundings. Are you bringing your own burnt pie to a Niemerg’s picnic? They make pies!

Timing really is everything, and had this movie been released in December, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

Thankfully, a full eighteen months separate us from the next Star Wars movie, which means at least some of the competition will be on Christmas break.

First Date

President Trump’s meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un this past week reminded me why I make a conscious effort not to watch cable news. Liberal outlets have gone to great lengths to minimize the importance of the meeting, some even portraying the event as an embarrassing failure, while conservative media has done the exact opposite.

Objectively speaking, North Korea can shoot a nuclear missile at about any American city it wants. That reality is unacceptable, and so it’s the job of the American President to do everything he can to keep that from ever happening, even if it means flying to Singapore to shake hands—repeatedly—with a quantifiably evil person. Granted, it is a sad day when an American President has to make such a concession, but this is 2018, not 1988, so let’s zip up our fanny packs and move on.

To use an analogy that will likely invoke nausea, Tuesday’s meeting was the first date, not the wedding night. It was not supposed to be the wedding night, and just because it wasn’t the wedding night doesn’t mean it was a failure. You have to have the first date to get to the wedding night, which, in this analogy, would be a completely denuclearized North Korea.

We shouldn’t be upset that after the “first date” there’s no engagement ring. However, we should also not go around and tell people there’s going to be a wedding.  It’s simply the first step in a very long and dangerous process.

Closure

The little bandages on her belly didn’t last long once she decided she could pull them off. “Got dots,” Annaka would say, referring to the fresh scar stretching from one side of her stomach to the other, bisected in the middle by a second cut moving up.

The closure surgery this spring went well. Like the name suggests, this procedure finished the surgical process that began over a year ago with her liver transplant. As is sometimes the case in infants, particularly in a live donation, Annaka’s doctors needed to keep the muscles of her abdominal walls partially open. Now that over a year had passed, she was ready to move forward.

This particular surgery was not as lengthy as her transplant, but I did find enough time during those hours to read most of Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451. I was teaching it for the first time to my seniors the following week, so it made sense to brush up on the classic. (And by “brush up” I mean actually read it for the first time. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not as literate as a few people think.)

To summarize, Bradbury envisioned an America without books; a dystopic sterile-state where firemen are summoned not to put out fires but to start them using contraband literature as fuel. Bradbury, very much influenced by the infamous Nazi book burnings from decades prior, wrote his classic as a warning; not in an attempt to predict the future but, as he is says, “to prevent it.”

Did he succeed?

Partially, I supposed, or else the book itself—along with a class designed to discuss such literature—would not exist. Some of the ideas strung out through the novel, however, such as vulgar materialism, drug addiction, and a culture more involved with its television “families” than real ones, seem too close for comfort. Perhaps the most damning plot point in the book, in fact, is the discovery late in the novel that the firemen themselves have nearly become obsolete, as the vast majority of the citizens simply forgo their privilege of reading and thinking critically on their own. They have, in a sense, chosen product over process. They seek the quick end result offered to them by sedatives and non-stop entertainment in the place of thoughtful conversation and delayed gratification.

Are we there, yet? Are we close?

I graduated college exactly twenty years ago this spring, and have been teaching school ever since. Schools, ideally, are places where reading, critical thinking, and thoughtful conversations all unite. One thing I’ve noticed over the year, however, is that public education, because it is financed by a fickle state, can often be a game of trends.

As students going through the system, we do experience these trends but don’t really comprehend them, because in some ways our school days pass by as passengers on a boat.

As students, we hop onto boats that are already in mid-stream. We sail along with the current for nine months, then we take a break, skip onto another boat guided by another pilot for nine months, gently down the stream, until our time in academia ends.

Teachers, though, navigate with about the same boat throughout their careers. We move down the river, notice stuff on shore, and pay more attention to the weather than passengers riding along. We look out for rocks and other obstacles and for folks leaping off cliffs.

            I’ve seen some leapers over the years. Most survive. Many of them climb back up and jump again.

And I think, perhaps, this is one reason why I like spending part of my day as a writing teacher.

Writing is not trendy.

Yes, there are trends in writing instruction, but the craft itself is not up for debate. If you want to be a good writer, you write. You read, you reflect, and then you write some more.

            Writing is where reading, critical thinking and thoughtful conversation all stream into one. Writing is process, not product. Products are trendy, and products fade. After two decades of teaching school, I’ve seen some fading.

One of the best processes, and most difficult, is the process of helping children grow up.

Annaka recovered quickly, thank God, and just a few weeks after her surgery the two of us were outside enjoying a spring evening. We bounced a basketball back and…mostly back. An almost full moon began its toddle through the sky.

“Catch the moon.” She said, walking back into the garage where we hide the butterfly nets. I took down a red net and handed it to her. She stretched it into the air.

“Do you want to be on my shoulders?”

“Mmm hmm.”

I put her on my shoulders. She wiggled without caution and then stretched up again.

“Did you catch it?”

“No.”

“Do you want to try again tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

We put the net back up on the wall and walked back inside the house.

Three springs have now passed since we found out Annaka, before she even had a name, would be born with challenges. She will spend her whole life stretching, scratch-papering, rough-drafting her way through the process we call life.

We all will, however.

We all do, writing life stories with our moon shots and our scars.

Stand

Last week, about 50 EHS students joined hundreds of thousands of their peers across the country by walking out of their classrooms for seventeen minutes in honor of those killed last month in Parkland, Florida. These students, along with others like them, have been both vilified and celebrated. Depending on your vantage point, they are either misguided pawns of a leftist plot to destroy the second amendment, or they are the vanguard of a movement that has finally come of age.

As a high school teacher with two grade-school children, I have a special interest in these events. These are our students; these are our kids, and, as such, I would ask that we more seasoned Americans keep in mind that an entire generation of young people has gone to school with this threat in the back of their minds.

I was teaching at Altamont Grade School in the spring of 1999 when news of Columbine seeped into the classroom. Ever since that tragedy two decades ago, many policy makers and pundits simply walked backwards into their respective ideological corners and began shouting.

For example, many commentators remind us that society is broken. Guns are not the problem, we are told, people are the problem, and, until we fix people, we shouldn’t expect much progress. Gun control—of any kind—is not only unconstitutional and unpatriotic, it just won’t work. Criminalizing guns will mean that only criminals will have guns.

And there is logic to that argument. Society is broken. Equally important, the overwhelming majority of gun owners are responsible, law abiding citizens, and considering our nation’s success with prohibition, trying to take away those rights would end badly.

However, others will often point out that the nature of assault rifles in particular make them too dangerous for the general public to own. These are weapons designed not for hunting or even target practice but for killing many people in a short amount of time. What legitimate purpose does such a tool pose outside of the military? And another thing, we are told, according to many polls, most Americans are open to the idea of some restrictions when it comes to purchasing such a weapon.

Those are the talking points for both sides and have been as such for years. So, let’s pause for just a bit and switch gears.

Imagine you are a patient dying of a disease, and one doctor comes in and tells you that he has the cure. The only caveat, however, is that he will need to fly a rocket ship to Jupiter in order to collect the materials for the drug.

How optimistic are you?

Now imagine another doctor walks into your hospital room, and this doctor tells you that she has the cure, but she will need to dig a hole to the center of the earth to collect the materials. Now how do you feel?

For all practical purposes, both doctors have told you that you’re going to die, right?

That’s what the school shooting debate is beginning to sound like: two opposing “solutions” that are so far-fetched that they may as well be terrible jokes.

Folks, guns are not going anywhere. If the feds didn’t come after the guns after twenty grade school kids were massacred while a liberal Democrat lived in the White House, what is the likelihood of it happening now? And blaming “bad parenting” for school shootings? How do you even begin to quantify “bad parenting?” How do you legislate away “bad parenting” like it’s an outdated trade embargo?

 Perhaps I’m oversimplifying a bit, but are you at least beginning to understand why our students are so frustrated, confused, and scared? Do you get why many of them walked out of school last week?  Twenty years of high profile school shootings, and we’re still talking about gun control? We’re still talking about “fixing” society, like it’s some piece of porcelain that’s been knocked off a shelf?

How about we meet in the middle and treat our students—our children—at least as well as how we treat our jewelry? I understand it’s not always a pleasant idea to have armed personnel patrolling our schools, but at least it’s something. At least it’s an acknowledgement that the issue—however statistically unlikely it really is—merits serious focus. After all, nearly all school shooters are mentally ill young men, but you have to be a special kind of crazy to walk into a building guarded by someone as well armed as you. At the very minimum—and I know this sounds crass but this whole thing is crass—we would suffer fewer casualties, as the most recent school shooting in Maryland suggests.

In the meantime, while we wait for policy makers to discuss ideology at the expense of solutions, the rest of us, particularly those who actually work in a school five days a week, will continue to focus on the immediate task at hand: trying to give our students a good reason to walk into the building. 

Dreft

I’ve kept a Tuesday afternoon that smells like Dreft.

Perhaps more accurately, I have kept a memory of an afternoon from a few years ago, when Ellyana was a toddler. It was a bright day, early spring, too chilly to go outside. She had a slight fever and couldn’t go to daycare, and it was my turn to stay home with her from school.

We spent at least an hour that afternoon reading books. We played Memory Match and My Little Ponies; she fell asleep in my arms watching TV. I turned off the television and held her for a long, long time. The world, on that afternoon, was a very good place.

That day and others like it often bubble up in my mind whenever I smell laundry that has been washed with Dreft detergent, designed to be safe for sensitive skin. My plan is to smuggle a small bottle of it into the nursing home when I get old.

Speaking of getting older, Ellyana turned nine last month, and I was reminded of a National Geographic article I once read that was all about nine-year-olds. Dozens of children from all walks of life were interviewed and asked questions about what they wanted to do with their lives, nine being, the story suggested, the “twilight of childhood.” I found the article quaint when I read it and she was seven. Now I’m not for sure where the magazine went.

Much less quaint, a sophomore in my English class recently wrote a research paper about suicide. Although suicide has always been part of the human condition, instances of it have spiked in the last decade or so, particularly among our young people. I asked my sophomores “Why is that? What is different about growing up now?” It was not a rhetorical question, designed to lead them to some forgone conclusion. I really wanted to know what they thought, and so I listened very closely.

“People now are meaner.” One young lady remarked.

“People are just weaker minded nowadays.” A young man explained.

“Different reasons.” The author of the paper began. “Now people can hide behind a smartphone and say the most terrible things that they would never say to your face. It’s constant. It never, ever ends.”

When I was in college twenty odd years ago, I took a lot of pictures. Sometimes my camera—a film camera, obviously—captured images of silly young people doing silly young people things. The photos weren’t all that scandalous, really, especially by today’s “standards,” but they still weren’t pictures to share with your grandmother. If an antic was too stupid, though, I would just pitch it.

Keep it hidden, keep it safe, deep inside your mind and go ahead with your week.

I have often tried to imagine what it is like to navigate adolescence when almost anything you say and do can be digitized, uploaded, and shared with everybody in just a few moments. All the dumb, silly, adolescent stuff you say and do can be permanently recorded. And, even if it isn’t, you still walk around knowing full well that it could be.

For our young people, 1984 has arrived, and Big Brother is sitting behind them in Chemistry.

Our daughter, of course, wants a smartphone. She isn’t getting a smartphone. Not anytime soon.

That isn’t really a solution, though, is it?

I have read at least a half dozen articles in the last year about the dangers of excessive screen time and about the addictive qualities of the apps we keep, software that is actually designed to be addictive.

Years ago, Steve Jobs sat down to an interview with New York Times reporter Nick Bilton just a short while after the launch of the first iPad. Bilton asked him what his kids thought about the device, and in a response that has earned considerable attention since them, Jobs replied,

"They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home."

In other words, the guy who helped design the device didn’t really design it to be a toy. He certainly didn’t design it to be a babysitter.

I am not a Luddite, however, and this column is not a diatribe against technology. If you have ever been to my house, you know my own kids spend more time in front of a screen than they should. At the end of the day, gadgets are tools, and, like any tool, they can be used for good or ill. After all, hammers do smash the occasional thumb, but they also build homes.

The purpose of this column, then, is to ask the adults in the room to do everyone a favor: give the kids a break. The world our children are growing up in might share some similarities with the one we remember, but those commonalities are becoming increasingly surface level. The advent of the smartphone and social media is changing the brain chemistry of an entire generation in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Give the kids a break, from their devices, but also from the assumption that they “have it easier” than we did because there is less physical work to be done and we require less physical work from them. Their world might be softer, shinier, more plush around the edges, but it is not easier. There is nothing easy about being called a name online by a few hundred classmates Sunday morning for something you didn’t do on Saturday night; there is certainly nothing easy about wondering if one of your classmates is planning the next mass murder.

            In closing, Dreft is actually kind of pricey, so we’re switching to a less expensive alternative. It probably won’t be as good at conjuring up Tuesday afternoons, but we all have to grow up eventually.

            Nostalgia, too, can be expensive, because we end up trading our moments—our “now”—for polished up memories that merely sit pretty on already cluttered shelves.  For our young people, who have no choice but to grow up now, in these moments, the price for this nostalgia is too high.   

Project 7:15 - New Year's Update

As a quick review, my reputation as an uncertified life coach basically hinges on my ability to successfully complete an A.I.T., otherwise known as an Amazing and/or Inspiring Transformation.  As mentioned on day one of this process, “I need to change myself in a very obvious and public way over the course of a set amount of time.  I need to begin as person ‘A’, and then, by a combination of ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and even ‘D,’ become the person I was always meant to be:  ‘E.’” 

To become person ‘E,’ then, I began a very arduous regimen of not eating cookies after going to bed. This might sound stupid and perhaps even useless, but to put into context, I had a problem. I would wake up in the middle of the night numerous times throughout the week and gorge on milk and cookies like an off-season Santa Claus. It was gross. My pants would not fit, the intense sugar-rush played havoc on my sleep schedule, and, of course, the rest of my family was furious at me for basically ruining their lives by eating dessert in the middle of the night.

Thus, on July 15^th this past summer, (hence the catchy name of my endeavor, “Project 7:15,”) I gave up midnight cookie binging. Cold turkey, I just quit, and the effects were almost immediate. For starters, by family liked me more and within a few weeks my pants also started treating me with more respect. I slept better, which cleared my head, which lead me to the next step of Project 7:15: forgoing random sweets.

The modifier “random” was attached to distinguish the 99% of processed sugar we come into contact with on a daily basis with the 1% of desserts that actually do make our lives better: your mom’s homemade dessert she spent hours making just for you, for example, or the sugary gift offered by the young person who needs to feel some self-worth.

Things went quite well for the first few months. Before long I was fitting into clothes I hadn’t worn in years and much of the sluggishness that comes from sugar was no longer part of my day. (I still had the sluggishness that comes from parenting three young children, of course, as well as the fatigue that originates from teaching high school English, but one must tackle the opponent that one can catch.)

Then, however, as often happens in life, a parade rained on my success. What happened was this: I was sitting at the homecoming parade in early October, enjoying the gorgeous fall evening, catching stray bits of candy thrown toward my children, when I had a moment of weakness. I can’t even remember what it was, likely a cherry Starburst, but it tasted so good, I thought, ‘Hey, it’s the homecoming parade. This sugar has social merit, right? I’m being sociable.  How about another?”

So I ate another. And then another. Soon my dinner was ruined and the old, unwelcome lethargy had returned. What is unfortunate about sugar, like any addiction, is that once you return to your fix, it becomes that much easier to return again. And again.

Halloween showed up, along with trick or treating, and, yes, I ate more of my kids’ candy than I should have.  Thanksgiving showed up, and, yes, I enjoyed some pumpkin pies. Plural.

And we won’t even mention Christmas.

Today is a new day, however. It is a new year, in fact, and with it, we see new opportunities for amazing and inspiring transformations. My pantry has no Oreos in it, and that is a good place to start.